(2) So which is it, are these developments turning Brooklyn into a ghost town or making Brooklyn horribly overcrowded? It seems that every other development post on this website leads to a cascade of comments that the area doesn’t have the resources (schools, medical, fire, etc.) to handle the influx of new people. You’re saying adding a 1,000+ ft. high building is going to have the opposite effect. It can’t do both.

(3) My argument is that the entire city needs more housing stock, which necessarily requires building up. I would love for a comprehensive housing program that was building more and better housing for the truly needy, but our society lacks the political will to get that done. But, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t add housing stock for the luxury market, at the very least it will replace lost residences in brownstones that are purchased and recombined into single family homes.

(4) I don’t see why business districts are even needed these days. In the wired age of internet, video-conferencing, etc., the physical proximity to other businesses is completely unnecessary. Mixed use is completely appropriate. And alternatively, building where your residents can easily reach lower manhattan and all of midtown is great for residents and the environment. The fact that the the transportation hub was built for a business center 100 years ago has no bearing on what we use that transportation hub for today.

(5) We seem to be in agreement that building should take place, and I agree that upzoning your cited areas would be good for housing stock in this city. However, neighborhood opposition would almost certainly make such moves impossible, especially to build at the scale necessary to really make a difference. In the meantime, we should not be opposed to building in locations where there is both the will to build and the opportunity to do so.

1. These residential towers tend to replace commercial buildings that hold a lot of small and medium
sized companies and good middle income jobs. A residential tower will hold perhaps 4 to 6 jobs at most.
since the rezoning, Downtown Brooklyn lost over 1 million square feet of office space. Think of how many lost companies and jobs and tax revenue that represents.

2.The towers constructed do nothing to solve the housing crisis. They make it worst. This is because most of the new construction is luxury apartments with a few “affordable units” for people that make only $100,000 per year. There is no shortage of luxury housing in the city. On top of that the city looses even more money by tax giveaways to developers for “affordable units”.

3. By adding a large stock of luxury high priced apartments in downtown the surrounding areas are affected by rents rising. Eventually more people move out, less people can live here, even upper middle income people. according to the New York times.

“Between 2006 and 2013, more people left Brooklyn than moved there —
about 618,000 versus 437,000 — according to an analysis of census and
other data by Susan Weber-Stoger, a researcher in the sociology
department at Queens College”

4—- The whole principle of building residential in a commercial center is wrong. A century’s worth of investment in the transportation hub was to bring people in from the surrounding and distant areas making it easier for companies and people to work in a “business district”. Now that is being reversed. They are re-purposing downtown for a privileged few to live there and be able to go anywhere in the city at the cost of companies, jobs, tax revenue ect.
–So much sacrifice by so many for so few.–

When I look out the window I see so much land in Brooklyn where these tall residential buildings can be built.
corridors such as Flatbush avenue, 3rd avenue, kings highway around the elevated subway tracks. All these should be up zoned. Downtown Brooklyn should be up-zoned even more but only for commercial buildings.

Oh by the way, the very LAST thing we need is some wild development is great type or child of the Frankfurt school lecturing us on NIMBY.
If someone dumps some toxic waste next to my home and I don’t feel it belongs there that somehow makes me a bad guy? really?

You can poison a neighborhood or a whole city in many ways, high taxes, the wrong or worsening housing, the wrong neighbors, ALL of which happened here. So there are VERY legitimate reasons to have concerns and not want the many destructive syndromes now at play in the Heights.

First of all, we have a quality of housing problem due to our having an aging housing stock which was not upgraded because of the declining quality of life in the city. Disasterious policies which led to the loss of a viable middle class. The answer to this from the policy makers was not to try to cause a restoration of a stable middle class. No, their answer was, immigration for poorer areas and yuppies for “better” areas. Neither of course, begins to replace a classic stable middle class, but the financial community and the NGO’s along with waves of morons in government, thought that was great.

Now we are creating waves of housing for more obnoxious, irespon-sible self focused yuppies and Ugo Eurobucks types. Good idea. Drive out what remains of the middle class. And, who exactly is going to pay for the infastructure which already under very significant decline and stress? The developers/architectural/construction sector? They want to take their profits and run. The Real Estate sector?

But let me ask you..does it make sense, that we are making enemies all over the world, and in our major cities we are now increasingly building structures with marginal resistance to deliberate damage?

Now this city is filled with cost to square foot ugly, and believe us, dangerous construction.

This is an age of uglyness, binality and stupidity……

Here’s an image of the city from the 1936 science fiction movie “Just Imagine!”: